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Industrial nostalgia
Jan. 9th, 2013 11:01 pmI've been having fun watching old railroad promotional videos on YouTube (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq_YcGK9aAU). Some of the technologies of the day, such as the ticker tape machines and punched card sorters used to keep track of freight shipments, or the on-board telephones that use the rails as wires, are astonishing.
Some of the language strikes me as ridiculous: "it takes a lot of [people with penises] to keep those trains moving".
But I love the boundless optimism that comes across ("look at how far we've come since the covered wagons and muddy trails of the 1850's... just imagine where we'll be in another fifty years"). And we actually made things in New England back then... imagine that.
There's a Santa Fe film called "Pay Day" about a railroad employee who spends a lot of money on a brand! new! TV! first one on the block! only to find it all smashed up when he opens the box, because someone at the railroad -- maybe even he -- wasn't attentive enough to his or her (probably his, though, the Santa Fe had people with penises keeping its trains moving, too) job.
And there's one the Kansas City Southern produced in 1940 to promote its new passenger train, the Southern Belle. They hold a beauty contest, running the train from Kansas City to New Orleans, picking up contestants along the way, with the final event held at Pontchartrain Beach, an amusement park in New Orleans I remember from my childhood (it closed in 1980, but the lighthouse seen in the video is still there, abandoned and decrepit).
Of course, all the contestants and everyone but the Pullman porters are white. And the winner... might have been a distant relative of mine. I Googled her, and found that she went on to be an actress, got married, had a bunch of kids, and died about a decade ago in Amarillo, Texas.
Some of the language strikes me as ridiculous: "it takes a lot of [people with penises] to keep those trains moving".
But I love the boundless optimism that comes across ("look at how far we've come since the covered wagons and muddy trails of the 1850's... just imagine where we'll be in another fifty years"). And we actually made things in New England back then... imagine that.
There's a Santa Fe film called "Pay Day" about a railroad employee who spends a lot of money on a brand! new! TV! first one on the block! only to find it all smashed up when he opens the box, because someone at the railroad -- maybe even he -- wasn't attentive enough to his or her (probably his, though, the Santa Fe had people with penises keeping its trains moving, too) job.
And there's one the Kansas City Southern produced in 1940 to promote its new passenger train, the Southern Belle. They hold a beauty contest, running the train from Kansas City to New Orleans, picking up contestants along the way, with the final event held at Pontchartrain Beach, an amusement park in New Orleans I remember from my childhood (it closed in 1980, but the lighthouse seen in the video is still there, abandoned and decrepit).
Of course, all the contestants and everyone but the Pullman porters are white. And the winner... might have been a distant relative of mine. I Googled her, and found that she went on to be an actress, got married, had a bunch of kids, and died about a decade ago in Amarillo, Texas.
